Some children find it hard to listen to conversations in a noisy environment because they are slow at switching their attention between different speakers.

… such children can fail to understand instructions, perform badly in subjects where class noise levels are high and quickly become the “black sheep” of the class.

Imran’s colleague Pia Gyldenkaerne has investigated the brain activity of children with listening difficulties, Auditory Processing Disorders (APD). These children had different brain activity when compared to children with no listening difficulties.

e-portfolio adoption must form part of a strategic approach and requires new practice due to their disruptive nature. Implementation has been planned for and with continued management should realise tangible benefits although it is acknowledged that this is a slow, iterative process and understanding will develop with experience and over time.

I am profoundly interested in the use of e-portfolios as a way of sharing life experiences as well as being an exciting assessment option. Today’s feeds have reminded me that listening is a fundamental issue I must address particularly if I use lecture theatres and SlideCasts as fora to share information and experience.

Of all the free-time activities teenagers do, such as playing computer games, cooking, playing sports, going to the cinema or theatre, visiting a museum, hanging out with their girlfriend or boyfriend, reading is the only activity that appears to help them secure a good job.

At the age of 16, in 1986, they were asked which activities they did in their spare time for pleasure. These answers were then checked against the jobs they were doing at the age of 33, in 2003.

… there was a 39 per cent probability that girls would be in professional or managerial posts at 33 if they had read books at 16, but only a 25 per cent chance if they had not. For boys the figures rose from 48 per cent to 58 per cent if they read books.

This is the abstract of the paper presented at the Conference:

Digital Habits

My wife Sue shared Jemima Kiss’s post with me. Sue has a remarkable list of RSS feeds that she scans every morning and points me to articles I would not find alone.

We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for.

Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live.

That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline.

Jemima follows up on some ideas shared by William Powers in Hamlet’s Blackberry and discusses how we might exert “a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives.” (For six other books on the Future of the Internet see this post by Maria Popova.)

Balance

The juxtaposition of the data from the 1970 Cohort Study and Jemima’s 2011 journey raise fundamental questions about long term development. My own reading spurt occurred from the age of 17 to 22 in a delightful pre-Internet age. I read voraciously now too but do most of that reading online.

Although I have a very large number of social media accounts I am using them less and less. I am a peripheral participant in many of the online exchanges. I am not sure if it is a country life that prompts this peripheral activity. I am certain that it is my wife’s support for a balanced life that is the tipping factor.

BCS70 began when data were collected about the births and families of just under 17,200 babies born in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in a particular week in April, 1970. At this time, the study was named the British Births Survey (BBS), and it was sponsored by the National Birthday Trust Fund in association with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. (Subjects from Northern Ireland, who had been included in the birth survey, were dropped from the study in all subsequent sweeps).

Since 1970 there have been six attempts to gather information from the whole cohort, as the chart below shows. With each successive attempt, the scope of enquiry has broadened from a strictly medical focus at birth, to encompass physical and educational development at the age of five, physical, educational and social development at the ages of ten and sixteen, and then to include economic development and other wider factors at 26, 29 and 34 years.